In what seems to be a newly-evolved form of the 15-year-old Mars Hoax people have recently been asking me about a “double Moon” that they heard is supposed to occur. I hadn’t come across it myself (maybe because I follow too much *actual* science news) but it sounded suspiciously familiar and, now being August, I figured…

No. No it does not. But that’s exactly what the Trump administration wants, and so today, August 9, 2018, America’s eerily stone-faced Vice President Mike Pence confirmed that there will indeed (pending Congress approval) be a new sixth branch of the U.S. military up and running by 2020, one dedicated to “restoring America’s leadership in…

It’s Opposition Day! No, that’s not a political stance but rather a geometric one, relating to the positions of Earth, the Sun, and Mars in the Solar System. Today our neighboring planet Mars will be directly opposite the Sun relative to Earth, which will make it the second-brightest “star” in the night sky after Venus….

Water has been found on Mars! (Yes, again.) In what’s turned into the biggest space news of the day, today ESA (and that’s pronounced “eesa”, you don’t need to spell it out) announced that the Italian-run radar experiment aboard its Mars Express orbiter has provided the first good evidence of liquid water present beneath the…

You’ve undoubtedly heard many times over the historic words uttered by Neil Armstrong when the Apollo 11 LM Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969 and when he stepped off the ladder onto the Moon’s dusty, desolate surface later that same day, but the success of the Apollo 11 mission…

This dramatic image, a color-composite I made from raw data captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, shows a bright band of high-altitude clouds on Jupiter’s northern hemisphere on July 16, 2018. Because of the abstract nature of Jupiter’s atmosphere in general (and a fun little phenomenon called pareidolia) one could find many different shapes in this…

Saturn’s largest moon Titan boasts the distinction of being the only moon in the solar system to have a thick atmosphere…so thick, in fact, that its surface is perpetually hidden from our view—but not from the view of the Cassini spacecraft’s infrared cameras! Cassini, now over ten months gone after its Sept. 2017 plunge into…

Jupiter is the reigning heavyweight among the planets in our solar system so it just makes sense that it also possesses the most natural satellites. Over the past year I have been gleefully telling people that Jupiter has 69 moons (usually to a shocked response, occasionally to a giggling one) but now I must admit…

Holy Hadean history Batman, where does the time go? Today marks the third anniversary of New Horizons‘ flyby of Pluto and Charon, the first, last, and as yet only mission ever to the distant dwarf planet (aka the reigning King of the Kuiper Belt.) All of the close-up detailed images of Pluto and Charon we…

Everyone’s heard of Jupiter’s four most famous moons Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede—we’ve known about them for over 400 years, thanks to Galileo—but giant Jupiter has many more moons than that. To date there are thought to be 69 natural satellites orbiting Jupiter. 53 are officially named, while 16 are awaiting further confirmation. So you’d…